# 9572
During the first two winter waves of H7N9, affected Chinese provinces posted reasonably detailed end-of-day updates on their provincial health department websites, and within 24 hours Hong Kong’s CHP would release a summary.
While we certainly never believed these reports reflected the total burden of the epidemic, they were a pretty solid indicator of those cases sick enough to be hospitalized and tested.
This year the reporting is less organized, with some cases not announced until days or even weeks after the fact (see Jiangsu Province’s Uncertain H7N9 Count), while other times we only see reports appearing in the Chinese media. Some provinces (like Guangdong) appear to be quicker to publicly announce cases than others.
And in just about all case reports this winter we are seeing considerably less detail than in previous years. All which makes keeping track of this year’s cases much more difficult.
Our first stop this morning is Guangdong Province, which for the 3rd day in a row, reports 2 new H7N9 cases.
Dongguan report two cases of H7N9 cases
2015-01-14 16:01:16 Ministry of Health and Family Planning |
Health and Family Planning Commission of Guangdong Province January 14 briefing, Dongguan City, reported two cases of H7N9 confirmed cases.
Patient 1 Zhang, female, 52 years old, currently living in Dongguan Qiaotou, history of pulmonary tuberculosis. January 13 diagnosed cases of H7N9, the current patient in critical condition, in Dongguan City, admitted to inpatient hospitals.
Patient 2 Xu, male, 37 years old, now lives in Changping Town, Dongguan City, a history of hypertension. January 13 diagnosed cases of H7N9, sicker patients currently in Dongguan City, admitted to inpatient hospitals.
Our next stop is Hong Kong’s CHP which reports on the above two cases, along with 14 additional cases (most of which I’ve announced previously in this blog) from four other provinces, bringing CHP’s total to 478 cases.
HP notified of human cases of avian influenza A(H7N9) in Mainland
The Centre for Health Protection (CHP) of the Department of Health (DH) is today (January 14) closely monitoring 16 additional human cases of avian influenza A(H7N9) notified by the Mainland health authorities, and again urged the public to maintain strict personal, food and environmental hygiene both locally and during travel.
According to the Health and Family Planning Commission of Guangdong Province, the two cases from Dongguan include a female patient aged 52 and a male patient aged 37 who were hospitalised for treatment in critical and serious conditions respectively.
The remaining 14 cases (including three deaths) in Fujian (five cases), Jiangsu (four cases), Zhejiang (four cases) and Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (Xinjiang) (one case) were notified by the National Health and Family Planning Commission. The patients include seven men and seven women aged 20 to 83. Apart from the three deaths, the other 11 patients were in critical condition.To date, 478 human cases of avian influenza A(H7N9) have been reported by the Mainland health authorities, respectively in Zhejiang (145 cases), Guangdong (121 cases), Jiangsu (63 cases), Shanghai (42 cases), Fujian (28 cases), Hunan (24 cases), Anhui (17 cases), Xinjiang (nine cases), Jiangxi (eight cases), Beijing (five cases), Shandong (five cases), Henan (four cases), Guangxi (three cases), Jilin (two cases), Guizhou (one case) and Hebei (one case).
Based on the information provided (absent onset dates, ages and genders) it makes it all-but-impossible to maintain a reasonable line-listing (and difficult even, to match them up with earlier reports), but hopefully some of these data gaps will be filled in by the next World Health Organization update.
In the meantime, based on the limited data we have, it is safe to say this year’s H7N9 wave on the Chinese mainland appears to be well underway.
